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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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often brings about a fair and just decision because there is the friction that the legal side won't agree with the examining side, or the prosecuting side, or the complaint receiving side.

Nat Witt also very largely appointed all the personnel - all the trail examiners, all the assistants to the trail examiners, all the lawyers. He was the Secretary and did all that. The person who appoints people is of course very influential with them. That had been one of the great complaints. Witt was a very competent man.

I talked with Millis about all this when he took office and Millis, within a month, told me, “Well, I think you're mistaken about Witt. I understand Witt perfectly. To be sure, he's a little radical, he's on the pink side, but I knew how to handle this.” It was the same old story of the good man who thinks he knows how to “handle” people, and will tell you he does, just as Phil Murray felt he could handle them, and John Lewis thought he could handle them - “Now, I can handle them, don't worry. I know what I'm about. These people (the Communists) are very useful to me.” So Millis said to me.

Somehow I don't recall just when or how Witt left the NLRB and entered the private practice of law but it was sometime in early 1941. Edwin Smith's term was to expire in August 1941.





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